Book Image

Learning Firefox OS Application Development

By : Tanay Pant
Book Image

Learning Firefox OS Application Development

By: Tanay Pant

Overview of this book

With broad compatibility, the latest in web technologies, and powerful development tools, Firefox is a great choice for both web developers and end users. Firefox OS’s promotion of HTML5 as a first class citizen opens up the walled gardens of mobile application development for web developers. It is because of this initiative that no special SDKs are required to develop for Firefox OS. This book will help you excel in the art of developing applications for Firefox OS. It sequentially covers knowledge building, skills acquisition, and practical applications. Starting with an introduction to Firefox OS, usage of WebIDE, and then the application structure, this book introduces applications of increasing complexity with each chapter. An application that measures your tapping speed, a geolocation tagging application, and a photo editing and sharing application are the three applications that will be built from scratch. You will learn about topics such as the difference between various types of Firefox OS applications, application manifest files, offline apps, and designing principles for applications. You will also learn to test and submit the applications to the marketplace and finally maintain the repository of the Firefox OS application. By the end, you will be able to develop beautifully designed, fully-fledged, and rigorously tested Firefox OS applications and also share them at the Firefox OS Marketplace.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Firefox OS Application Development
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Spoof Firefox OS Add-on


If you own an Android device and don't want to test your FxOS app on a real Firefox device, then a good news for a developer like you is that you can now test your FxOS apps right on your Android device. This is possible by installing the Spoof FxOS add-on to the Firefox browser of your Android device. This can be downloaded from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/spoof-fxos/.

What the Spoof FxOS add-on does?

According to Mozilla, this add-on makes Firefox on Android send the Firefox OS User-Agent, and disables Flash, to make it simpler to test on Android how a site is likely to work on Firefox OS. A full emulation is not possible, especially for video and performance issues.

This means that the Firefox browser in your Android device will just pretend to be the Firefox OS browser, which enables you to test and debug your Firefox OS apps on your Android device. After downloading the add-on, enable the add-on from the browser's settings by clicking on the Enable...